


Your Cover's Blown

by ragmatical



Category: IT Crowd, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Diogenes Club, F/M, I Dated a Ghost, The Empty Hearse Club
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 19:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2743985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ragmatical/pseuds/ragmatical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's smart, and you can trust her. Totally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Cover's Blown

          _Sliding his wicked fingers under the embroidered hem of her bell sleeve, the Count encircled her arm and bent his head to murmur in her ear. His voice was a rich, viscous thing, and he tipped the words in like poison. "And who do you think will stop me? A delicate flower like you?"_

          _Miss Bellingham shuddered. "You will never triumph," she bit out fiercely, her bosom swelling with indignation - something Count Fortescue appeared to note with interest. "I won't let you!"_

          _"Oh?" her arch-nemesis said, his eyes fixed distractedly below her —_

  


"Miss Riley!"

The chief editor's voice cracked down on her like a whip. Kitty Riley's head snapped up with equal force, her ears hot. Every face in the board room turned to look at her.

She closed her laptop, remembering that by all appearances, she had been taking notes. Industriously.

"Ah - what was the question?" she asked, her voice only faltering a little on the first syllable. "Sir."

"Do keep up," Donahue said, the bland disapprobation in his voice nothing short of maddening. She'd grown used to that indifference, but familiarity didn't make her stomach sink any less when she heard it.

 _Typical rookie,_ it said. _Really scraped the bottom of the barrel for that one. One catastrophic failure after another. A dismal investment. A raincloud over the_ Sun's _bright day. Redundancy any day now. Be doing her a kindness if we sent her to catering. Is it Katie or Kathy again?_

The click of a presentation pen brought her out of her head and back into the streaky sunlight of the board room. (No budget for overhead lighting anymore. No budget for her either, soon enough. Repellent, just like Sherlock Holmes said. Tosser that he was, he was right. _I'm a hack,_ she thought hopelessly, _a troglodyte, pond scum_ —)

There she went. Indulging herself in dramatic melancholy again. Her therapist had told her to stop that. It was so laughably self-aggrandizing, when she wasn't even a piece of chewed-up _gum_ under their _shoes_ —

"No!" she said, impassioned, standing up.

Now they eyed her in the same way they would a zoo animal coming out of sedation.

"No," she saved herself, "don't listen to those...uh, cretins. You're...you're obviously right."

"Yes, well," Donahue said, mollified slightly, pulling on his tie.

Fantastic. It was an editorial scuffle. She'd guessed right.

"If you care to elaborate," her supervisor pressed, waving his hand.

She went sickly pale. "I, ah —"

Just then, an interruption came in the form of an intern, holding himself up against the door frame like he'd just done a burst of sprinting.

"The telly! Turn on the telly!"

It was the divine hand of God. She was as good as invisible in the melee that overtook the room.

Chaudhry and McGregor from Sports both leapt for the remote at once, Donahue frowned in her general direction, and she let herself sit down and melt back into her chair. A positively salacious hunger crackled in the air over everybody. She could hear it snapping and buzzing like wires at an electrical station. The newsman's constant search for a story.

On went the conference screen.

Yes, an ace distraction. She couldn't have asked for better.

It was the late Richard Brook in a nice suit. Bloody buggering _Christ_.

Over a background of unfocused lights and white text, the face of her first big break smiled at her. Far from the shabby ghost who haunted her dreams, this man looked healthy — well-groomed — smug, even. A tinny little voice rang out from the screen: jaunty, mechanical, just the sort you heard all the time on children's games. That's what he'd fooled her into believing he was, she reminded herself. A children's actor.

Everyone was back to staring at her now, aghast. They knew the story as well as she. That he was, in fact, a lunatic. That he'd killed himself on that rooftop, the day everything went too far.

Kitty Riley — intrepid reporter, relentless public servant, scourge of double-dealing everywhere — ( _pathological liar, spinster,_ no, _shut up_ ) — sat riveted in place, feeling altogether like a child about to be sent to detention, as those impossible words tumbled out of the conference screen.

"DID YOU MISS ME? DID YOU MISS ME? DID YOU MISS ME?"

 _I didn't, thanks,_ she thought to herself, wondering if Happy Hour had started yet next door.


End file.
